Pat Pilcher: Pirate Bay browser clocks up massive downloads

To celebrate their 10th anniversary file sharing site ThePirateBay have launched a web browser that allows people to access blocked websites.

The move has proved hugely popular in countries such as the UK where access to file sharing sites has been blocked.

The popularity of the PirateBrowser is also likely to be of major concern to governments blocking access to ThePirateBay and other sites.

Within three days of its launch over 100,000 downloads have happened via the direct link provided by ThePirateBay, and the torrent file is also being shared by a rapidly growing number of peer to peer downloaders.

According to ThePirateBay sources, PirateBrowser downloads are now averaging out at a staggering thousand downloads per hour.

The browser is based on Firefox 23 and incorporates a Tor (the onion ring) client to bypass ISP filters plus proxy configurations designed to speed things up.

The current edition is a Windows only version, but ThePirateBay have confirmed that both Mac and Linux versions are also in the works.

Equally intriguing, ThePirateBay are working on a peer to peer app which will see blocked websites stored locally on hundreds of thousands of PCs, effectively making it impossible for governments to block them.

The move by the ThePirateBay represents the second round in an ongoing game of site blocking whackamole as the site responds to moves by governments to filter or block internet access.

Should ThePirateBay team successfully implement a peer to peer method for locally storing entire websites, any hopes of controlling internet access is likely to become increasingly difficult.